Khaled Hosseini interview

I think, modern, contemporary fiction shies away from the emotional because they fear they might seem sentimental, which appears to be the great crime of writing contemporary fiction. And there's a respect for writing that is comical or analytical. And a kind of frowning on fiction that is strong on emotions. They call it 'pulling the heartstrings'.  But none of that is of much concern to me. I write my stories the way that I feel them in my heart.

Martin Amis on his fiction

..I’m drawn to extremes. The class that’s absent from my fiction is the middle class. I think they’ve got plenty of novelists attending to them. They needn’t whimper with neglect because I don’t do them

2013 Man Booker International Prize awarded to Lydia Davis

American short story writer LydiaDavis won the fifth Man Booker International Prize for fictionon Wednesday for a body of work that includes some of thebriefest tales ever published.

"Her writings fling their lithe arms wide to embrace many a kind. Just how to categorise them? They have been called stories but could equally be miniatures, anecdotes, essays, jokes, parables, fables,texts, aphorisms or even apophthegms, prayers or simply observations." 

Personally, I feel very inspired because as a writer I love brevity and hate being categorised. 

Isabel Allende interview

Writing a memoir about the death of my daughter saved me from going crazy. It allowed me to understand and accept what happened. I will always carry sadness with me but it has not destroyed my life. I was able to process it, as you say – it was very cathartic.

              

Criticism in the age of internet

Some springs, I teach a college class on criticism in the age of the Internet. Early on, I ask students to think about the difference between a rating, a recommendation, a review, and a piece of criticism. Most of them locate those four types of opinion on a continuum; the earlier ones, they say, require less time to create. I ask them whether this means that they are less valid as opinions. No, they say. Definitely not. Discussion ensues. One thing they decide fairly quickly is that the validity of opinion does not mean the same thing for different types of objects. A product (a toaster or a smart phone) reveals itself immediately. The only thing you might discover about it later is that it has ceased to perform its central function well. This is not the case with works of art. They do not show themselves all at once. Rather, they unfold over time. They gestate in the minds of viewers or listeners or readers.

Helen Garner on book prizes

The trouble starts at the moment when you get the crazy idea that not winning a prize means you're no good. It doesn't mean that at all. I have been a member of several judging panels. I have witnessed the strange dynamic of their functioning. Forces that outsiders can't even conceive of are at work in those meeting rooms. Under all their beautiful intelligent reasoning, prize judges, like people in every sphere of action, are driven by unconscious urges. How could it be otherwise? They are not sphinxes, or oracles, or disembodied spirits. They are people, subject to moods, full of contradictions and unacknowledged emotions and thwarted longings of their own.

Self-publishing Vs Traditional publishing

Self-publishing is as much a lottery as traditional publishing. Each has benefits, each has pitfalls. I think the vast majority of people who self-publish do so because they don’t see any alternative way into publishing. Even if you find yourself an agent and get a publisher on board—which is hard enough—there’s still no guarantee of success.

Last Days of a Real Writer

Subimal Misra, the well-known Bengali writer, called me this evening. Before going to my clinic, I was watching news on the telly at that hour.

Just when I was trying to relocate who it was speaking, he said, "Mrinal-Babu, I'm Subimal Misra. How are you?"

I hurriedly muted my TV set and replied, "Hi Subimal-da! How are you? I hear you after a long time."

"I'm in a very bad shape. That's why I'm going to disturb you."

"What's the problem?"

"You know I've scores of diseases: diabetes, asthma, a pace-maker in heart. But right now I'm having severe cough with shortness of breath. Can you suggest some drugs for me?"

I didn't respond immediately. The fact is, he is unwilling to go to any doctor for whatever reasons. May be he doesn't like visiting any doctor at all. And then he lives alone in a tiny rented flat far far way in the south. He seldom goes down out of his flat. How he manages his day-to-day living, I don't really know. I've not seen him in years - some eight or so. The only bit of news that I get of him is from his translator V. Ramaswamy, who is my friend. Ramaswamy keeps regular contact with him and helps him whatever way he can. .

"Are you listening to me, Mrinal-Babu?"

His is a long tired voice, and I can gauge he's breathing with difficulty. He must have some respiratory infection.

"Well, Subimal-da, take down"

I see him scribbling the names of drugs.

"Thank you. Part 1 of the problem is solved. The second part remains: to buy he drugs from the medicine shop. Who would go to buy it? I've not gone out of my flat for last two months".

"What about your fans and friends?"

"They have all abandoned me."

Silence reigns between us for a long while.

"Have you heard from Ramaswamy recently?"

"Yes. His 21-year- old son has passed away. How sad! Have you seen the boy? Long ago Ramaswamy came to take me to a doctor.. The boy was in the car".

"Are you writing these days?"

"How can I stop? I breathe in my writing".

Read a Subimal Misra story (translated)
 

Lit News: Witold Gombrowicz diary to hit bookstores on May 23

Four decades after his death, the diary of Polish author Witold Gombrowicz which finally hits book stores in Poland later this month will offer an intimate glimpse of the literary giant who made no secretof his homosexuality.

And now digitized Carlos Fuentes

Carlos Fuentes' works will be published as E-books for the first time in US on the first anniversary of his death in Mexico city, according to PW.

Terrorism in Indian fiction | Politics in Literature

Terrorism in Indian fiction
 We live in a world petrified by the monster of terrorism. This will obviously reflect in fiction too. And it’s no surprise that Indian authors have jumped on to the terrorism bandwagon.  

 Politics in literature 
The raw material of writers is the entire world that we live in; a world that continuously shapes us as we in turn shape it, through our poetry or fiction. The writer is someone who has no choice but to be engaged with society, which means political engagement. Nothing escapes the snare of the political, big P or small p – it is about the price of bread, the paycheck you bring home, how you interact with neighbours or whom you choose to romance. You can rebel against the latter or hew your own path, but your choice will be shaped by political concerns, and those have always included religion, race or ethnicity, sex and gender. Today, perhaps, more than ever.

Philip Roth's latest honour

Philip Roth's latest honor was as much for what he has done for other writers as for his own work.

Roth received the PEN/Allen Foundation Literary Service Award Tuesday night. He was cited for such novels as "Portnoy's Complaint" and "American Pastoral," but also for his advocacy in the 1970s and 1980s for writers in Czechoslovakia and other Eastern bloc countries during the Cold War. PEN, in the midst of a weeklong "World Voices Festival," is an international writers' organization that defends human rights.